It seems every year, thousands of bug reports are submitted to the EQ2 team during Beta. And it seems every year, a few highly visible bugs/exploits make it through. Last year, it was large encounters in The Hole that would respawn if all but one mob were killed. In The Shadow Odyssey beta it was widely reported that most of the dungeons could be completed when mentored down and greyed out.

So this year, so far we know of two:

Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar (Lord Bob) could be exploited to provide loot over and over. Lord Bob was fixed in today’s hotfix.

The EQ2 Update Notes for February 24, 2011 include a variety of fixes and tweaks, and a couple of nerfs. Check them out after the jump…

UPDATE: These are actually the Update Notes for February 24th.

After reading the Upcoming Housing Improvements! thread on the EQ2 Forums, and then hearing more about these changes in the Velious Webcasts, one might have logically concluded that these changes would be IN Velious.

You’ll recall that SmokeJumper referred to the Freeblood Estate, as well as Miragul’s Summer Home (part of the Velious Digital Collector’s Edition) as being smaller prestige homes that would connect to your main house once these changes went into effect.

After the jump, we get an estimate about when we might see Multiple Housing Ownership…

If you have been abusing milking enjoying the Refer-a-Friend 300% XP bonus for its high speed leveling (and thus AA earning) goodness, especially by parking a level 1 trial account character at the zone-in, well, I’m afraid that has finally come to an end.

From Rich Waters 0n the EQ2 forums:

The Recruit-a-friend program is a great way for you to bring your friends into EverQuest II and help them level up a bit faster by playing together. When you group with a character you’ve recruited, you both gain a hefty 200% experience bonus. Unfortunately, many people were recruiting themselves and using it as a way to power-level their main character, rather than actually playing with a friend.

We’ve added a couple of limitations to the recruit-a-friend bonus to prevent it from being a solo leveling tool. In order to get the recruit-a-friend experience bonus:

From Domino on the EQ2 Forums:

I spent the afternoon today lurking around listening in channels, including the homeshow channel, and heard quite a few comments about some changes to water textures and reflections. (Thanks to all who provided details!)

I talked to GermInUSA, who has been working on improving water and reflections lately. The quick fix is to turn on this display option:

Ctrl-O (open your options); click the advanced button; under the display options, in the “water” section, tick the “water reflections” tick box. (Despite the name, this also affects non-water reflections.)

Rothgar, Zoltaroth, and others on the EQ2 team, as well as OPS (Operations) were up until all hours trying to wrangle Everfrost and the Freeport [EQ2X] servers into behaving reliably. But first, a quick fix for Everfrost players who are missing characters:

Everfrost players who are still missing characters are encouraged to follow the instructions on the EQ2 Forums. In short, go to your EQ2 folder and delete your LoginCache and LoginCache-US folders, as well as any <Servername>_characters.ini files.

It seems we’re the only ones calling today’s update “Game Update 59”, but either way, the Update Notes have now been posted!! The patch notes from the EQ2 Forums (after heavy reformatting and cleanup):

We are still over 2 hours away from the EQ2 servers coming up with the Destiny of Velious/Game Update 59.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

I just wanted to check in and comment on the few people having trouble accessing their characters.

One thing you can try is deleting your cache and logincache directories. Also, you might try creating a new character on Crushbone. This normally forces a download of all characters on that server and will fix missing characters. You can then delete the temporary character.

I’m really glad to see there were so few problems with this merge. Makes sense that after so many of them they would start to get easier!

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Ok, we’re there!

If you find any issues or problems, please report them here asap or message me in game. I’ll be in chat.

and regarding Call of Guild Hall, at least ONE member of your guild will have to zone into the guild manually to reactivate it:

Keep in mind there is a known issue with your Guild’s Call to Guild Hall spell.

Someone will need to zone into your GH through the door in order to re-establish that you have the call amenity. Once that is done, everyone’s spell should work again.

But I Can’t Connect!

If you have characters on Lucan D’Lere, then the first time you login, you’ll need to go to the Character Select screen and pick your character there. If you try to pick a character on your Launcher, you’ll be trying to connect to Lucan D’Lere instead of Crushbone.

In-Game Calendar

If you have longed to be able to organize Guild Events into an in-game Calendar, post a Raid Schedule, or get a reminder on which City will be visited next by the roving City Festival, you’ll be pleased to see the addition of a Calendar in Game Update 59. The calendar will be populated with Live Events, possibly Server Events posted by Community Managers, and also your Guild leadership will have the ability to add events (it’s gained a new permission under Guild Ranks).

Ready Check!

From the Update Notes:

Raid Leaders can now initiate a ready-check by right-clicking the raid window. Raid members in the current zone will be asked if they are ready and the results will be displayed in the raid window as well as in raid chat.

This will be a great addition for Raid Leaders to be able to make sure everyone is back from AFK, and probably also a good way to find out who’s watching TV (or worse) rather than paying attention. 😉

NOTE: This is a PREVIEW. Additional features and tweaks may occur to render these screenshots outdated.

Big changes to Mechanics and Itemization have coincided with the last 2 expansions and Destiny of Velious is no exception. Today we delve into changes to:

• Procs (Item Effects)
• Adornments
• Critical Chance
• Critical Avoidance
• Primary Stats (Stamina, Intelligence, Agility, Wisdom, and Strength)
• Health
• Power
• Melee Range
• Multiattack
• Ability Mod

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

The merge process is moving forward on schedule. There have been no issues so far and I’ll update again in the morning.

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Lucan D’Lere and Crushbone servers will be taken offline at 12:00am PST on Wednesday, February 16th [Thursday 16 Feb @ 8:00] and will be offline for an estimated 24 hours. The merged Crushbone server should be back online sometime around 12:00 am PST on Thursday, February 17th.

The following services will be affected for all EQII servers during this downtime and may experience interruptions:

• Cross-server chat
• Chat channels
• In-game mail
• Friends Lists

We apologize for any inconvenience and will resume all affected services when the merge is complete.

and this update:

Lucan will be coming offline at 9pm PST [05:00 GMT]  to prepare for the merge.

Here are your February 15, 2011 Update Notes from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• An issue that stops ambient characters in city zones from wandering has been fixed.
• ‘Follow’ should once again be an option on group member’s right-click menu.

LIVE EVENTS

• Sister Thog Macgilly will now update the quest “Premonitions of Disaster” even while Erollisi Day is being celebrated.
• Creatures within the Shard of Love now have a significantly higher chance of dropping love loot while Erollisi Day is being celebrated.

After yesterday’s update activated the Erollisi Day event, some players were reporting crashing issues in Halas. Others reported issues in Antonica as players were able to spawn unlimited gazebos. An interim fix for the Halas issue was implemented, with today’s update providing a more permanent solution. Also, last year’s quests are now repeatable. All of the issues with Erollisi Day were spelled out in this thread.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums regarding crashes when entering New Halas since Erollisi Day was hotfixed:

Just an update to say that we are troubleshooting the problem and will let you know as soon as we have a fix available.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Things are going very well and considering the extra time we expected from moving the data a long distance, we’re actually running ahead of schedule. Our QA department is checking things out now and if we don’t find any issues we hope to have the server up early.

Thanks for your patience during this downtime!

and later:

Update:

We are still having some issues with the chat portion of the merge, its just taking a little longer than expected to move friends lists, mail, etc.

Everything else looks good so as soon as I have more info, we will let you know.

With 6 and 7 room houses now outstripping the storage capacity of even medium-sized Guild Halls, some players figured out that the StationCash Marketplace Item Expanders could be placed in guild halls.

Today’s hotfix changes that:

• Fixed a bug where players could use marketplace item expanders on guild halls.
• Players who have done that will have the item expander applied to their personal house when they next zone into their personal house and the item expander will be removed from the guild hall.
• If this puts a guild hall over its item limit it will still have the items but you will not be able to add more items until the item count is reduced.
• The character house item bonus from the marketplace expander now properly applies to your home and shows in the total number of bonus items in the UI.

Instead of two downtimes, the Runnyeye -> Splitpaw merger will happen in one fell swoop.

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Runnyeye and Splitpaw servers will begin merging on Thursday, February 3, 2011.

Runnyeye will be taken offline for the last time at 2pm PST (10pm GMT) on Thursday, February 3.

Splitpaw will be taken offline at 9pm PST on February 3 (5am GMT on February 4).

Splitpaw will then undergo the regular weekly hotfix before merging. Once the hotfix has completed, the server will stay offline for another estimated 27 hours while the merge takes place.

The merged Splitpaw will be offline for an estimated 27 hours and is scheduled to come back online as soon as the merge has completed. We estimate an uptime of around 8 am GMT on February 5.

Revising a previous announcement, here is a notice from the EQ2 Forums:

This is a notification that Splitpaw will be updated at 12:00 AM London Time on 02/02/2011. The estimated downtime will be 18 hours.

– SOE Operations team

A new date for the Splitpaw/Runnyeye merger has yet to be announced.

From the EQ2 Forums:

All SOE forums will be undergoing maintenance on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, from 10:00am PST until around 11:00am PST [18:00~19:00 GMT].

During this time the forums will not be accessible. We will return to regular functionality as quickly as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

From the EQ2 Forums:

The Lucan D’Lere and Crushbone servers will be taken offline at 12:00am PST on Wednesday, February 16th and will be offline for an estimated 24 hours. The merged Crushbone server should be back online sometime around 12:00 am PST on Thursday, February 17th.

A brief update from the EQ2 Forums:

The merge has been postponed temporarily while we work out some of the back-end logistics. We will update again when we have more information.

The Runnyeye to Splitpaw European server merge has been announced. This server merge was initially delayed because of the necessity of a database upgrade to support the merged server. All told, Splitpaw will be down for virtually all of February 2 and 3. For some folks, February will only have 26 days this month. Details after the jump.

Today’s surprising announcement (in light of comments last week about the unliklihood of characters being able to own more than one home in the forseeable future) is that in a future update, players will be able to own multiple houses. The announcement also confirms the names of some of the upcoming Prestige housing which we first picked out of vpk updates, namely the Dojo and Opera House. Along with the Skyblade Skiff,  Freeblood Manor, and the Everfrost Summer Home (Miragul’s Managerie) this will bring the Prestige housing options up to 5.